Obama--the grumblings

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

(pouncing) Doublethink!

Reread your Orwell and decide if doublethink is the road to virtue.

No one told me I was supposed to be seeking virtue.

Now I have to rethink everything. [/whiny voice]

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

One thing you're going to have to observe, Shawnee, is just how little the responsible rightwingers behave like the common run of the leftwingers.

A responsible winger? What? Being off on one wing or the other automatically disqualifies a person from being responsible.

Well behaved? Maybe. Responsible? Nope.

[classicman]

Change we cannot and do not believe in
This is not the kind of change Obama promised us in 2008.

When Barack Obama was running for the Democratic nomination last year and then for the presidency in the fall, one of the most attractive things about his candidacy was his promise of change that we all could believe in.

He campaigned on a promise of change that would mean no more cozy lobbyists-in-government schemes, no more ethically-challenged appointees ignoring laws that apply to everyone else.

Two weeks into the Obama presidency, we like his campaign better than his administration. While Mr. Obama has set the right tone for approaching the monumentally hard work ahead of this government and while some of his appointments are outstanding, others were either badly botched or reflect a half-hearted commitment to the change principle central to his ballot-box success last fall. Consider:

His nominee for treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, failed to pay $35,000 in self-employment taxes while working for the International Monetary Fund, and did so only after the president-elect made his decision to nominate Geithner for treasury secretary. Mr. Geithner's contention he did not realize he owed the taxes and was not prompted to report them by his tax preparation software strains the imagination at best and sounds more like a man caught in a lamentably lame lie.

His nominee for deputy secretary of defense, William Lynn, is a former lobbyist for Raytheon. His appointee for chief of staff at the Treasury Department, Mark Patterson, lobbied for Goldman Sachs. During his presidential campaign, Obama criticized a culture in which “our leaders have thrown open the doors of … the White House to an army of Washington lobbyists who have turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.” Has anything really changed?

His nominee for chief performance officer, Nancy Killefer, withdrew after disclosure she failed to pay unemployment taxes for household help at her D.C. home.

His nominee for secretary of health and human services, former Sen. Tom Daschle, failed to pay $140,000 in income taxes stemming from his use of a luxury car and driver provided to him by a campaign donor and owner of a business Daschle advised. Daschle said the failure to pay was unintentional because the firm had not provided him with an IRS Form 1099 showing the car as income. His explanation is hollow. As Democratic leader in the Senate, how could he not know that the value of in-kind services must be reported as income? Perhaps the only thing unintentional about this is that Daschle never intended to be found out. While Senate Democrats were willing to stand by him, Daschle had the gumption to withdraw Tuesday and avoid further embarrassment to the Obama administration.

President Obama has a clear vision of a bipartisan government for which millions of Americans earnestly yearn. We wish him the best – and urge him to be more vigilant about adhering to the promises that won him the White House.

I agree with the last paragraph.

[sugarpop]

Well, in Obama's defense, there is only so much he (and his team) can do to find this stuff out. They are looking at people's tax records and digging into their backgrounds, and asking extensive questions, but if people don't disclose things that aren't there in black and white, there isn't much they can do about it. Yes, they did drop the ball. But it's not like Obama cheated on his taxes. Or like he condones the behavior of those people. (And I'm not really sure they DID cheat. If someone makes an honest mistake, and then repairs it, why is that necessarily a bad thing?) I owed some back taxes once for several years before I paid them. I just think people might be making too big a deal out of this.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

. . . must be nice to know that nothing changes in the land of UG.

Appearances, as so often, belie the reality. What's actually going on is that most of what I write is about the permanent things. I doubt I'll have one more word to say about the disgraced Illinois Governor, the distinctly impermanent Rod Blagojevich.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by TGRR

A responsible winger? What? Being off on one wing or the other automatically disqualifies a person from being responsible.

Well behaved? Maybe. Responsible? Nope.

I think you're confusing "extremists" with "people rather to one side or the other of the middle of the road." For me, that's close enough to the "wings."

Welcome to the Cellar.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

I think you're confusing "extremists" with "people rather to one side or the other of the middle of the road." For me, that's close enough to the "wings."

Welcome to the Cellar.

Thanks.

TGRR,
Knows that extremism in defense of extremism is no vice.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

No one told me I was supposed to be seeking virtue.

High time they did. Virtue; it does a body good.

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Now I have to rethink everything. . . .

That's the spirit!

[Aliantha]

I gave away my 'virtue' a long time ago, much to my mothers disappointment.

[classicman]

Obama’s 5 p.m. signing came barely three hours after the House approved the bill, breaching Obama’s promise to have a five-day period of “sunlight before signing,” as he detailed on the campaign trail and on his website.

Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act only two days after it received final passage last week, and it wasn’t posted on the White House website until after it became law.

Politifact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times that tracks Obama’s campaign promises, says the five-day rule is the only pledge he has broken outright.

On the Ledbetter Act, the website wrote: “We recognize that Obama has been in office just a week, but he was very clear about his plan for a five-day comment period, and we can’t see why this one needed to be rushed. It is somewhat ironic that with the same action, Obama both keeps and breaks a campaign promise.”

Not really a big deal, but still.

A White House spokesman refused to comment on the matter.

How unusual.

[TheMercenary]

Tax cheats and broken promises

After just two weeks in office, the Obama administration is having a hard time living up to the Obama campaign's mantra of change for the better. Unless, of course, "better" is defined as an administration made up of a handful of tax cheats and broken promises.

While much of the United States is still basking in the afterglow of an historic election and an inspiring inauguration, much of the world is looking at Obama's first two weeks in office with incredulousness.

From a policy perspective, several countries have voiced concerns about the protectionist aspects of Obama's "stimulus" bill currently making its way through the US Senate. Meanwhile, even left-leaning France has rejected an Obama-style spending binge.

What is more troubling to many, is that at a time when the United States is saddled with unprecedented levels of peacetime (at least officially, as Congress has not declared war) debt, Obama chose outright tax cheat Timothy F. Geithner to be Treasury Secretary.

Yet, evading taxes appears to being de rigeur for the Obama team. Tom Daschle, Obama's pick for secretary of health and human services, who several years back excoriated tax evaders, happened to forget until recently to pay at least $128,000 in taxes. Meanwhile, just today, Nancy Killefer, who failed to pay employment taxes for household help for almost two years, withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government.

Now, it is also coming to light that after promising a clean break with the politics of the past, and promising not to have a lobbyist-tainted administration, exceptions are being made.

All the while, the bill aimed a reviving the American economy is getting more expensive by the moment, with the help of ever more lobbyists. At a time of increasing pressure on the average American household, how many tax cheats, lobbyists, and broken promises will the American public tolerate before it demands real change?

http://www.examiner.com/x-2888-World...roken-promises

[TGRR]

Hmmm...the World News Examiner wrote an op-ed slamming Obama? How will he ever sleep at night again?

[TheMercenary]

The same way Bush lost sleep over anything posted by The Daily Kos or Huffington Post.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

The same way Bush lost sleep over anything posted by The Daily Kos or Huffington Post.

Precisely.

What's the point of even posting op-eds, especially from hopelessly biased sources?

[TheMercenary]

For one reason. It provides insight into how fucked up other people think. Just like when ever I read anything referenced from one of those two source. ILMAO.